The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  Like Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, Pobedonostsev favored theocratic rule through mystery and authority. He was opposed to all freedom of expression and favored the systematic subordination of sectarian and minority cultures to a monolithic Russian Orthodox culture. Access to pernicious foreign ideas was to be confined to an intellectual elite; but otherwise education was to be limited to catechistic indoctrination in Russian traditions and moral values.

  In some respects Pobedonostsev's social doctrine resembles the theory of "freezing up Russia to avoid rotting" contemporaneously being advanced by Constantine Leont'ev. He detested the tendency toward uniformity in "the Europe of railroads and banks … of increasing material indulgence, and prosaic dreams about the common good."5 Reminiscent of Nietzsche is his aesthetic antagonism to bourgeois mediocrity, which amplifies a sentiment already found in Herzen as well as Pisemsky and other anti-nihilist novelists of the populist era:

  Is it not dreadful and humiliating to think that Moses went up upon Sinai, the Greeks built their lovely temples, the Romans waged their Punic Wars, Alexander, that handsome genius in a plumed helmet, fought his battles, apostles preached, martyrs suffered, poets sang, artists painted, knights shone at tournaments-only that some French, German or Russian bourgeois garbed in unsightly and absurd clothes should enjoy life "individually" or "collectively" on the ruins of all this vanished splendor?0

  There will be no beauty in life without inequality and violence. To pluck the rose, man must be willing to pierce his fingers on the thorns. Even before the outbreak of the first Balkan War in the mid-seventies Leont'ev insisted that "liberal nihilism" has produced such "decrepitude of mind and heart" that what is needed for rejuvenation may well be "a whole period of external wars analogous to the Thirty Years' War or at least to the epoch of Napoleon I."7

  For aristocratic and aesthetic reasons, Leont'ev rebelled at all reforms, proposing a total return to the ritual and discipline of Byzantine rale. He died as a monk in the monastery of the Holy Trinity, bemoaning the end of the age of poetry and human variety. Pobedonostsev, on the contrary, was a thoroughly prosaic lay figure, whose ideal was the gray efficiency and uniformity of the modern organization man. He was the prophet of duty, work, and order-shifting his bishops around periodically to prevent any distracting local attachments from impeding the smooth functioning of the ecclesiastical machine. He was unemotional, even cynical, about his methods. But they were generally effective and earn him a deserved place as one of the builders of the centralized bureaucratic state. Like the modern totalitarian regimes which his own rule often seems to anticipate, he has a low view of human nature and insists that regimes based on a more optimistic reading of the masses will collapse. "The state must show in itself a living faith. The popular mind is suspicious and may not be seduced … by compromise,"8 he insists in criticizing advocates of constitutional processes for Russia. Any efforts to transplant democratic institutions to Russia will merely lead to revolution.

  Organization and bribery are the two mighty instruments used with such success for the manipulation of the masses. … In our time a new means has been found of working the masses for political ends .. . this is the art of rapid and dexterous generalization of ideas disseminated with the confidence of burning conviction as the last word of science.9

  In a sense Pobedonostsev foresaw the program of revolution that would prevail in Russia even before the revolutionaries themselves. He sought to combat it with his own forms of organization, indoctrination, and forced conformity.

  The most consistent opponent of his policies was Tolstoy, who after completing Anna Karenina in 1876 had given up his brilliant career as a novelist to preach his own form of Christian living to the Russian masses. The extraordinary spectacle of a magnificent writer and exuberant aristocrat wandering in peasant garb among the peasants of his estate and writing elementary primers on Christian morality attracted world-wide attention and deprived Tsarist absolutism of its moral authority among many thinking people. By the end of his long life many Russians spoke of their "two Tsars": the crowned Tsar in St. Petersburg and the uncrowned Tsar in Yasnaya Polyana.

  Tolstoy was such a formidable figure that he transcends the environment in which he lived, yet he was deeply rooted in it. His greatest novel,

  War and Peace, is a panoramic, epic tale of Russian history. His other monumental work, Anna Karenina, is an effort to solve the problem of family happiness and social adjustment that had plagued Russian aristocratic literature from Pushkin through Turgenev. In the character of Platon Karataev in the first work and Levin in the second, Tolstoy begins to develop his new ethical philosophy of returning to the harmony of the natural world. In contrast to the Karamazovs' love of the elemental and sensuous, of "life more than the meaning of life," Tolstoy's Levin insists that life without meaning is unbearable, that life "has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it." The last thirty years of Tolstoy's own life were spent in trying to define "the meaning of goodness" and to saddle his own earthy personality to the task of bringing good into the corrupted life of late Imperial Russia.

  During this long and baffling period of religious teaching, Tolstoy develops a number of concepts that had become important in the Russian intellectual tradition. His moral puritanism and rejection of sexual lust and artistic creativity are in the tradition of the sixties; his personal passion for identity with the peasants and the unspoiled natural world is a reflection of the populist ethos of the seventies. His belief in human perfectibility puts him in the main stream of Russian radical thought, as does his anarchistic rejection of institutional coercion and constitutional processes. Most important of all, Tolstoy avidly defended and was deeply influenced by the Russian sectarians. He viewed his own ethical teaching as the "true Christianity" of morals rather than metaphysics, a rational syncretic religion that required no church or dogma.

  What is unique in Tolstoy is the relentlessness with which he developed lines of thought that his predecessors had never carried to their logical conclusions. Implicitly throughout War and Peace and explicitly in the second epilogue he extends belief in the power of the people to the point where he denies any significance to the individual. In his religious writings he develops the populist faith in the power of moral ideals to the point where he renounces all use of coercion in support of such ideals. The populist belief that the search for justice must be accompanied by the search for truth led him to renounce his art and finally his family: to go off like Stepan Trofimovich at the end of The Possessed on a last pathetic pilgrimage into the countryside, which led to death in 1910 in a lonely provincial railroad station.

  The contrast is frequently made between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, two of Russia's greatest thinkers and of the world's greatest novelists. The epic, pastoral world of Tolstoy, the high aristocrat and rationalistic "seer of the flesh" is in many ways the very antithesis of the dramatic, urban world of

  Dostoevsky, the low aristocrat and often irrational "seer of the spirit."10 One image perhaps goes to the heart of the difference. In contrast to Dostoevsky's early love of Schiller and final apotheosis of the play instinct in The Brothers stands Tolstoy's early statement that "life is not a game but a serious matter"-which is repeated almost verbatim in his last letter to his wife. As he put it in his What Is To Be Done? of the mid-eighties:

  Human life . . . has no other object than to elucidate moral truths . . . and this elucidation is not only the chief but ought to be the sole business of man.

  Life was a serious matter for Tolstoy because it was the arena in which man's quest for moral perfection and universal happiness had to be realized. Unlike Dostoevsky, for whom evil and death were part of the greater drama of suffering and redemption, they were for Tolstoy unaccountable intrusions into his world of Promethean perfectibility.

  Tolstoy was terrified by death-an event which he portrayed in his works with the vividness and psychological insight of one who had obviously dwelt deeply on the problem. He w
as fascinated in his late years by Nicholas Fedorov, the librarian of the Rumiantsev museum (now Lenin Library) in Moscow, who taught that the advance of science would make possible the perpetuation of life and even the resurrection of those already dead. He also returned periodically to the idea that the assertive, artificial world of men contains less wisdom than that of animals, and that of animals less than that of the composed and earth-bound vegetable world.

  In all these interests, the naturalistic mind of Tolstoy seems to be pointing toward the areas in which Russian scientists of the 1880's and 1890's were to make some of their most distinctive theoretical innovations. The idea of prolonging life through dietary means and the establishment of new moral and biological harmonies within the body was an idee fixe of Russia's greatest biologist of the period, Elie Mechnikov. He subsequently became Pasteur's assistant in Paris and Nobel Prize winner in 1908. But his predominant interest in his later years lay in the science of geriatrics, or the prolongation of life-a field that was to continue to fascinate scientists of the Soviet period.

  The idea that many secrets of the universe are contained in the natural harmonies that exist between the earth and the vegetable world was the point of departure for Russia's greatest geologist of this period, Vladimir Dokuchaev. This imaginative figure from Nizhny Novgorod believed that all of Russia was divided into five "natural historical zones," each of which determined the forms of life and activity that developed on it. He was the founder of the untranslatable Russian science of "soil learning" (pochvove-

  denie), which is a kind of combination of soil genetics and soil mechanics. Like Mechnikov in biology, Dokuchaev in geology tended to be progressively more interested in the philosophic implications of his work, though Soviet hagiographers prefer to concentrate exclusively on the detailed investigations and practical discoveries of their earlier periods. Dokuchaev sought to study

  those eternal, genetic, and invariably regular links which exist between forces, bodies, and events; between living and dead nature; between the plant, animal, and mineral kingdoms on the one side and man, his life, and even the spiritual world on the other.11

  Dokuchaev was extremely critical of Western geology, which studied the soil only for utilitarian reasons. Pochvovedenie, in contrast, sought to gain an inner understanding not just of the soil but of the life that comes from it. Dokuchaev believed that there were "extremely close and everlasting interrelationships between water, air, land, plant and animal organisms" as well as the growth and changes in human society.12 Dokuchaev's science -together with the idealistic polemics of a former populist writer on village life for The Annals of the Fatherland, Alexander Engel'gardt-began the first serious interest in forest conservation in Russia as well as a vast reorganization and improvement in higher agricultural education. He compared water in the soil to blood in the body and inspired his followers to establish a science of "phyto-sociology," the study of forests as "social organisms."13 Raised in a clerical family and partly educated in a seminary, Dokuchaev freely acknowledged his debt to Schellingian Naturphilosophie. Most Western geologists still consider him an eccentric. But Dokuchaev's combination of detailed regional investigations and general idealistic enthusiasm was largely responsible for placing Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century at the forefront of scientific discovery in many fields of soil mechanics, permafrost research, and so on.

  Dokuchaev and Fedorov died a few years before Tolstoy and Mechnikov. None of these idealistic naturalists found the secrets of the tangible, physical world for which they all searched. Tolstoy lived longest, dying at the age of eighty-two. In accordance with the decrees of Pobedonostsev (who had preceded him to the grave by three years) Tolstoy was denied any religious rites at his burial. He was laid to rest on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana by the green stick on which, he had thought as a youth, could be found the secret by which all men could live in happiness and brotherhood. It was primarily this secret-the secret of a rational moral society- that Tolstoy had sought in vain to find. The passionate sincerity of his quest had kept alive, however, the populist tradition of moral dedication and

  Utopian hope. In contrast to the traditionalism and coerciveness of Pobedonostsev, Tolstoy presented the ideal of a non-violent moral revolution. In his religious teachings there is a curious blend of sectarian Protestant puritanism and Oriental resignation before the mysteries of nature. He has always been admired (and was to some extent influenced by) the more syncretic and anti-traditional forms of Protestantism.14 As a student at Kazan he had originally studied Oriental languages; he had a life-long admiration for Buddhism; and his own religious search brought him to admire Confucianism as the model for a religion of morality rather than metaphysics. It seems appropriate that his religious ideas were to have by far their greatest impact in the Orient-above all through Gandhi's adoption of Tolstoy's doctrine of non-violent resistance.15 Whereas Europeans have tended to view his later religious writings as a marked decline from the glories of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, non-Europeans often tend to view the latter as the minor youthful works of a man on the path toward rediscovering in the fullness of years the abiding truths of the agrarian East.

  Within Russia Tolstoy had only a handful of real followers. Neither he nor his foe Pobedonostsev was able to address himself to new problems and concerns. They were old men defending established traditions of the imperial bureaucracy and the truth-seeking aristocratic intelligentsia respectively. The power exercised by Pobedonostsev and the spell cast by Tolstoy helped weaken the effectiveness of more moderate reformers. Yet neither Pobedonostsev nor Tolstoy was able to dispel the prevailing melancholia of the eighties, let alone point the way to any new approaches to the problems of the day.

  Both looked on the major new trends in the surrounding world with fear and antagonism. The intellectual and political agitation of contemporary Europe seemed to them irrelevant, corrupting, and self-serving. In exasperation more than exultation, they both fled to a Christianity of their own devising: linked in Pobedonostsev's case to Oriental despotism and in Tolstoy's to Oriental mysticism.

  Yet it would be unjust to link the protean Tolstoy with the narrow Pobedonostsev. Tolstoy was, in many ways, the last true giant of the reformist aristocratic intelligentsia. He sought to find both their lost links with the soil and, at the same time, the answers to "the cursed questions" about the meaning of art, history, and life itself. The greatest novelist of his age, Tolstoy died wandering far from home muttering the words: "Truth . .. I love much . . . how they."16

  Here, truly, was a case of Gulliver held down by the Lilliputians: that fallen giant in one of Goya's last drawings over whose body an antlike army of little people swarms, planting their banner atop his sleeping head. Yet

  Tolstoy, like so much of the aristocratic intelligentsia, volunteered for his bondage to the people. Indeed, he identified the people with Gulliver in a characteristic entry in the diary of his later years:

  I went through the village and looked into windows. Poverty and ignorance were everywhere, and I reflected on the slavery of earlier days. Formely, the cause was visible, and the chain which bound the peasants easily perceived. Now there is no chain. In Europe there are threads -as many as bound Gulliver. With us one can still see ropes, or at least strings; there, threads-but they all still hold down that giant, the people, so firmly that it cannot move. There is only one salvation: not to lie down, not to fall asleep.17

  This restless ethical passion was to dominate the new and sleepless century. Indeed, the new bondage of the Soviet era was to be built in part out of attitudes of humorless puritanism and ethical fanaticism that the later Tolstoy shared with the revolutionary tradition. Tolstoy, however, rejected revolution,18 and died like a lonely sectarian pilgrim in search of truth. The admonition "life is not a joke"19 in his last letter to his wife is strikingly similar to the last entry in Ivanov's notebooks: "It is not permissible to joke with God."20 The icon for his peculiar faith was the famous canvas "What Is Truth?"
in which his friend Nicholas Ge portrayed a harried Christ before an imposing and imperious Pilate. The paintings and drawings by Ilya Repin of the aging Tolstoy in peasant garb on his estate served as the last icons of a dying faith that inspired awe but not imitation. There was no desire to be "very like" the late Tolstoy. His links were with the past, and his ideas developed in a world largely out of touch with the urban and industrial Russia that was coming into being.

  During Tolstoy's last years, which were the early years of Nicholas II's reign, a number of fresh ideas took root among the more cosmopolitan and better-educated populace.21 The 1890's began the richly creative final period of imperial culture known variously as "the Russian Renaissance" and "the silver age." There was a kind of renaissance quality to the variety and virtuosity of new accomplishment. If silver is less precious than gold, it nonetheless enjoys wider circulation. Never before had the high culture of art and theater, of politics and ideology, involved so many people.